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Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Suitebriar Case Study: Glassdoor

For millions of job seekers Glassdoor is an essential stop in their job search and career. Offering critical insights into jobs and companies, their culture, salary and other essential information has helped make Glassdoor one of the most well-known brands in recent years.The ChallengeWith that growth came new challenges internally for Glassdoor. Having began as a small start-up they have quickly grown to a company of over 600 employees. Director of Information Technology Umair Hamid quickly found that the initial investment in a hosted Exchange solution along with an organization using a 70/30 split of OSX to Windows devices was causing a lot of headaches.“Our Mac user experience was not great,” said Hamid.“We were using Parallels to install Windows so we could use Office for Windows. The Hosted Exchange we used was also high in cost. Additionally, there were no collaboration tools offered with our hosted mail service”.On top of the inherent cross platform flaws, reliability was also an issue. “Any given month, we would have email issues for a few hours on top of monthly costs, days of downtime, lack of business continuity, etc.”.Glassdoor needed a course correction in IT strategy that would provide a lasting, scalable, cost effective solution. They found that direction in Google for Work.The SolutionAfter a thorough discovery process weighing the benefits of both Google for Work and Office 365, Glassdoor found that the Google solution, in Hamid’s words, “integrated better with the tools we use on a daily basis.”Teaming with Suitebriar’s expert deployment and change management specialists, Glassdoor set to replacing their legacy system with Google for Work in a manner that would not disrupt their day-to-day core business. Change proved to be welcome as many of Glassdoor’s employees were already well versed with personal Google accounts to begin with.“Google Apps is a platform everyone is familiar with from their personal email, our employees love Google” said Hamid.“Using it in an enterprise setting is different and we found it contained quite a bit more more features but change management is absolutely critical in an enterprise environment. We’re now frequently utilizing Google Sheets and Hangouts. Anyone considering migrating to Google for work must also plan for the change management process to make it a big success” On top of user satisfaction, Google has exceeded expectations when it comes to simple cost savings and efficiencies.Hamid stated: “We’ve saved 40% on total per user cost, reduced IT hours spent maintaining our environment, have had 20% fewer email related tickets, and on top of that we’ve had almost no downtime in the last 9 months.”“We absolutely think Google has reduced our risk while increasing our scalability and flexibility - for example we use Okta SSO for provisioning accounts and we are doing some cool things with Google Groups to streamline email distribution lists”.Going Google is working for Glassdoor.